(no subject)

Dear George -- how Sharon should respond to Bush's demands. (From the Jerusalem Post.)

On the Mark stuff

I think I finally have the bowed-psaltery part for a new OTM song down. (This is "Rasputin's HMO", which I'm looking forward to springing on an audience. We stole it; we can't write stuff that funny.) I wrote the line, because I'm the one who's playing it and no one else knows the instrument, so I can write around the hard stuff. :-) I think it'll sound pretty neat with the mix; Robert and Kathy are coming for a min-rehearsal next week and we'll try this out before Andrea's next visit to Pittsburgh.

I hope the sound guys at Darkover are ok with miking a bowed psaltery. We usually have two concerts at that con, one in the large hall (requires amplicification) and one in the smaller room (no sound reinforcement). I usually try to save the weirder stuff for the small room, so Siggy (the sound guy) doesn't lose hair on our account. But this year they just gave us one (longer) concert in the large hall, so we'll see what we can do.

Close-miking us (that is, one mike per thing to be miked -- instrument or voice) is a real pain; we play a lot of instruments and everybody sings. So there's always this huge mass of mike stands and mikes between us and the audience, and it's harder to play that way. It would be great if they could just point a few broader-range mikes at the stage and let us do our own balancing, but I'm told by people who know these things that that trick only works in rooms that are already accoustically decent. (This one definitely is not.) So, for example, when we did our local concert last spring and hired Mike (our engineer for recordings) to tape the show so we could mine it for a live CD, he set up five or six mikes a few feet out across the stage area and that was it. (They were actually on the floor pointing up at the stage, if I recall correctly.) The recording sounded great from a technical perspective. But it was a good room (a concert hall) and he had about three hours available to set it up and test everything. When you've got that luxury, you can get rid of a lot of stuff on stage...

Pennsic house

Somebody at Sunday dinner (can't remember who now) asked about the little house I use for Pennsic. Here is a link. The pictures are out of date; we added some decoration this year. I have the new pictures scanned now (yeah, actual film -- no digital camera yet), but I haven't updated the site yet.

bright purple hair

Man, I hope that what I just saw go by in the hallway was a wig and not dye. Because if it's dye, it's going to stay that color for a very long time...

Halloween

The city declared that trick-or-treating will occur tonight between 5:30 and 7:30. There were times when that sort of thing made sense, back when single-income couples/families were the dominant thing and 40-hour work weeks were normal, but how many houses in my neighborhood are going to have someone home at 5:30 tonight? Certainly ours won't. I'll probably get home a bit before 6:30, and Dani will do about the same. Given that it's dark by 5:30 or 5:45 now *anyway*, they really wouldn't lose anything on the safety front by making it, say, 7-9pm.

Mind, I don't really care about Halloween; I just don't get into it. But this just seems like a bad idea for a lot of people.

Dani likes to give out comic books. (It's his token pruning of his vast collection...) I told him he's on his own for that, and bought a bag of candy in case I get home first. I figure that'll hold them until Dani gets home and takes over.

new monitor

The new monitor is really nice. But I can tell it's going to take me a little while to get used to the lack of distortion and curvature. I feel like I'm looking into the center of a concave surface, and of course I'm not -- it's just that the old one was convex. But the lack of distortion is fabulous, even if my brain currently thinks the edges of the monitor are closer to me than the center is. I'm sure it'll pass. :-)